Kolby is a four-year-old, identified on the autism spectrum as having sensitivity issues, attention challenges, and limited verbal language abilities. Next to Kolby sits Melanie, a reserved four-year-old with visual, fine-motor, and gross-motor challenges. Amy rounds out the group as one of the peer models in the inclusive classroom setting. Mrs.…

Elementary school teachers in Seattle, Washington, are encouraged to adapt differentiated instructional practices in math to accommodate the particular students in their own classrooms. Seattle Public Schools is a large, urban district serving 47,000 students who speak over a hundred languages. More than a third receive free or reduced lunch. The…

All good teachers recognize their students' varying learning needs and strive to meet them. So differentiation is certainly not a revolutionary idea. In fact, Tomlinson and Eidson describe differentiated instruction as "really just common sense" (2003, p. 1). In practice, however, offering such opportunities for students is challenging. In this…

In recent years, there has been a tremendous increase in the popularity of distance education among higher-education administrators. Students in growing numbers are also taking advantage of the flexibility and accessibility that distance education offers. This growth, however, has been a mixed blessing since it derives from using the Internet…

The list of 61 finalists for the latest Race to the Top competition shows that the U.S. Department of Education was successful in enticing high-scoring applications from districts in rural America and in states that had not shared in the Race to the Top bounty before. But whether the ultimate winners, which will be announced this month, will be…

Literacy, differentiated instruction, student engagement and academic achievement continue to be hot topics for educators, parents, legislators, and government officials. "Now I Get It! Differentiate, Engage, and Read for Deeper Meaning" is a practical, easy to use resource for classroom teachers, literacy coaches, school administrators and post…

This report summarizes survey results from newly hired teachers who participated in an August 2012 orientation and training prior to the start of school. Of survey respondents, most found orientation welcoming and useful. When asked about additional training they would like to receive, most wanted content-area instructional strategies,…

While "personalization" has become a buzzword in education, it can be hard to determine what really makes a subject relevant to individual children in the classroom. An ongoing series of studies at Southern Methodist University suggests learning students' interests upfront and incorporating them into lessons can get struggling students to try…

Rural areas in the alpine regions suffer from dwindling student numbers. Differentiated instruction (DI) could help improve the teaching culture by allowing instructors to better adapt to heterogeneous student groups. At the beginning of a combined research and school improvement project, a survey of 162 teachers and 1180 students was conducted to…

A typical classroom today is a jigsaw puzzle of learners. It is not unusual for a teacher to have in one class students from multiple cultures, bringing with them varied degrees of proficiency with English and an impressive array of learning exceptionalities (both identified and not identified), as well as a broad array of economic backgrounds.…

All children are born with the gifts of curiosity and creativity--and an insatiable appetite for asking questions to find out about the world in which they live. Fostering these questions and developing inquisitive and investigating minds is one of the essential roles of parent and teacher, and the processes of enquiry are the necessary routes for…

"Harvard Education Letter" is published bimonthly at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. This issue of "Harvard Education Letter" contains the following articles: (1) Bringing Art into School, Byte by Byte: Innovative Programs Use Technology to Expand Access to the Arts (Patti Hartigan); (2) Differentiated Instruction…

So1 is a new, individualized, technology-rich math program being implemented in three New York City middle schools. The program offers a high level of customization for each student, both in the content and material with which students engage, and in the teaching and learning modalities that are used to enhance students' mastery of the material.…

This study analyzed Taiwanese elementary school English teachers' perceptions of, designs on, and knowledge constructed about, differentiated instruction in content in an intensive summer course. Based on the data analysis of surveys, the document, videos, and an interview, the study had the following findings. First, before the intensive summer…

In this paper we present a case study of a self-paced university course that was originally designed to support independent, self-paced study at distance. We developed a social media intervention, in design-based research terms, that allows these independent students to contribute archived content to enhance the course, to engage in discussions…